Antiphon the Sophist

Antiphon was an orator and statesman who took up rhetoric as a profession.

He made an early attempt to square the circle and was the first to propose a method of exhaustion. He proposed successively doubling the number of sides of a regular polygon inscribed in a circle so that the difference in areas would eventually become exhausted.

Antiphon was involved in an anti-democratic revolution which failed and, despite his profession as a writer of defence speeches, his brilliant speech failed to save his life when he was tried for treason and he was executed.